“How Jacked Do We Think Trump Will Be When He Sees This?”: Bannon’s New Documentary Is Made for an Audience of One

On Thursday morning, Axios unveiled, with some skepticism, Steve Bannon’s latest attempt to re-insert himself into Donald Trump’s good graces: the trailer for Trump @ War, a documentary purporting to show the violent liberal backlash against voters who chose to make America great again. It is a fairly simple trailer, featuring footage that appears to show Trump supporters clashing with leftist antifa rioters, a generic, ominous orchestral soundtrack, and footage of CNN anchor and fake-news avatar Don Lemon ripping on Trump’s policies, interspersed with Trump’s favorite talking heads (Sebastian Gorka,Corey Lewandowski) and Bannon’s own personal allies (Raheem Kassam) calling for a midterm war. Their thesis: the midterms are a Trump “re-election campaign,” and voting in November is akin to voting Trump back into office—an easy case to make, considering prominent Democrats have repeatedly called for his impeachment. In an interview with Axios, Bannon insisted that the film would practically flood the polls with Trump voters—“If you’re a deplorable, you’ll literally be standing on your chair with your pitchfork saying: ‘I’ve got to get people out to vote’”—but also tipped his hand as to the film’s real purpose: “How jacked do we think Trump will be when he sees this?”

It was a typical Bannon move, both tonally and strategically. As one person who formerly worked with him told me, “He always used his second-rate filmmaking to get in with celebrities.” But this time, Bannon’s charm offensive included a few extra goodies to sweeten his re-entry: a new populist-nationalist political group called Citizens of the American Republic, a September event called the “Deplorables Conference” to coincide with the film’s premiere, and, of course, as much public praise as he could feasibly lavish on Trump. For any other ex-Trump employee, this would seems like overkill. But Bannon, whom Trump decimated in a statement as a leaker who had ”lost his mind,” has innumerable sins for which to atone. Not only was he directly responsible for the Republican Party losing the Alabama Senate special election to a Democrat, but he trashed Trump’s own children to a reporter, suggesting that Donald Trump Jr. had committed treason for holding a meeting with Russian lawyers. Even worse, he had reportedly begun mulling a challenge to Trump in 2020.

Trump’s ex-staffers have largely remained in Trump’s orbit, some by similar works of ingratiation—Sean Spicer, for instance, wrote a book calling Trump a ”unicorn.” As my colleague Gabriel Sherman recently reported, Bannon has also put together an informal group of people exiled from the inner circle by Chief of Staff John Kelly. This group includes Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in the middle of the 2016 campaign and briefly floated as a possible replacement for Kelly; and Sebastian Gorka, who may or may not have been forced out of the administration, and who defends the president so ardently on cable news that he’s still invited to the White House for dinner. Bannon has not achieved that status, and there’s a good chance he never will (it is, after all, hard to walk back accusing your patron’s son of committing treason). But he claimed to Sherman that he has been able to push his ideas into the White House through proxies like Lewandowski and Gorka, and their cameos in his documentary seem to translate that strategy to film.

Bannon has also worked hard to get to the head of the populist parade in other places. Earlier this summer, he launched a think tank called The Movement in Europe, intent on uniting the efforts of the continent’s various ethno-nationalist, anti-immigrant movements, and electing a “supergroup” of lawmakers into the European Parliament. But his reputation stateside has come back to haunt him. According to The Atlantic, Europe’s populist-nationalist royalty doesn’t seem to want him, either. “We’re not in America. . . . Mr. Bannon will not succeed in forging an alliance of the like-minded for the European elections,” Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party, told Reuters, while a spokesman for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally told Politico they rejected his help. (In the same article, Gerolf Annemans of Belgium’s Vlaams Belang Party suggested that Bannon’s occasionally “poorly organized” project was perhaps “an employment vehicle for [Brexit agitator Nigel] Farage.”)

No matter how many populist-propaganda peace offerings Bannon places at Trump’s feet, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to insinuate himself fully back into Trump’s court. Too, the propaganda qua propaganda, seems unlikely to be effective—is Bannon’s movie even really designed to be the centerpiece of a Deplorable Saturday night? Still, even as they forge their separate paths, there will be always be a synergy between Bannon and Trump. Trump is Bannon’s only possible populist move. And of all the advisers who have floated through the West Wing, Bannon is the only one who’s been able to distill, rationalize, and prettify Trump’s message. Much as he despises him for his betrayals, Trump, on some level, must know this.